Amara found herself holding her breath.
"All those who would vote no?" Valerius asked.
Hands began to rise, scattered throughout the seated Senators. Amara found herself counting them furiously.
"How many?" Bernard whispered.
"They need thirty-six," she replied, still counting. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty-four.
Valerius added his hands to those raised.
"Thirty-five," she hissed.
"Those who would vote yes?" Valerius asked.
Hands began to rise - and trumpets began to howl.
A wave of worried whispers washed up around Amara. Heads began to turn. One distant trumpet was joined by another, and another, and another. The whispers became a murmur.
"What is that?" asked a matron seated behind Amara of her husband. "The signal?"
The old gentleman patted her arm. "I'm not sure, dear."
Amara turned to Bernard, her eyes grave. He met her gaze, his own face calm but resigned. He recognized the standard Legion trumpet call just as well as she did.
The Legions outside the southern wall of the city of Riva were sounding a call to arms.
"They can't be here," Amara said. "Not already."
Bernard gave her a half smile and rose. Around her, other Citizens were doing the same thing, moving with brisk, worried efficiency toward the amphitheater's exits, the matter before the Senate forgotten. "They seem to have formed a habit of surprising us. Let's prepare for the worst and hope for the best."
She took his hand and rose. They were just leaving the theater when a young woman came rushing toward them through the crowd, being jostled roughly several times in her haste. She was a slender young woman, with a long, rather serious face and long, cobweb-fine hair of pale gold. "Count Calderon!" Lady Veradis called. "Count Calderon!"
Bernard caught sight of her waving hand and waded through the crowd, moving through it easily enough by dint of pure mass. Amara stayed close to him, in his wake, avoiding the minor collisions that would otherwise have rattled her.
"Veradis!" Bernard called. He took the girl by the shoulders, a supportive, steadying gesture. She was clearly shaken, her face pale, her eyes wide. "What happened?"
"The First Lady, Count," she sobbed. "It's chaos over there, and I can't find the Placidas, and I don't know whom to trust."
Bernard looked around for a moment, and followed Amara's pointed finger to an alley between two buildings, an eddy in the stream of humanity flowing around them. Bernard moved them over into the relatively quiet space, and said, "Slow down, Veradis. Slow down. What happened?"
The girl gained control of herself with a visible effort, and Amara remembered that Veradis was an extremely gifted watercrafter. The emotions of the frightened crowd were probably an ongoing torment to her. "Your sister, sir," she said, her voice steady. "Your sister's been taken. Araris, too."
"Taken," Amara asked sharply. "Taken by who?"
The horn signals continued to blow, growing louder and more numerous.
"I don't know," Veradis said. "When I got back to her chamber, the door had been broken down. There was blood - probably not enough of it to have killed anyone. And they were gone."
Amara heard, among the other calls, the trumpets of High Lord Riva's Legion sounding the assembly, from deeper in the city. As Citizens in service to Riva, Bernard and Amara had been assigned to the support of the First Rivan Legion. Bernard glanced up. He'd heard the sound, too. "I'll go," he said. "See what you can find out."
Amara bit her lip but nodded and turned back to Veradis. "Lady, can you fly?"
"Of course."
Amara turned back to her husband, took his face in her hands, and kissed him. He returned it with brief, fierce intensity. When they broke off the kiss, he touched her cheek with the back of one hand, then turned and vanished into the crowds.
Amara nodded to Lady Veradis. "Show me," she said.
The two of them lifted off into the night, two small shapes among many who were flitting through the skies over Riva, while the Legion horns continued to blare.
Chapter 11~12
Chapter 11
"You have no idea of the potential for destruction in the forces you are tampering with," Alera said calmly. "None whatsoever."
Tavi stood in his command tent, looking down at a large map of the Realm spread out across an entire tabletop, its corners weighted with small white stones. The air hummed with the tension of a windcrafting that would prevent their voices from carrying outside. His dress-uniform tunic was folded neatly on the cot in the corner, ready for his dinner with Kitai. "Then perhaps you should educate me," he murmured.
Alera looked as she always did - serene, remote, lovely, garbed in grey, her eyes shimmering through one metallic or gemstone hue after the next. "It would be difficult to truly explain, even to you. Not in the time that remains."
Tavi arched an eyebrow at that remark and studied Alera more closely. The human-appearing fury folded her hands before her, the posture of a proper Aleran matron. Had they been trembling? Did the nails look... uneven? Ragged, as if she'd been chewing upon them?
Something, Tavi decided, was definitely off about the fury tonight.
"If it isn't too much trouble, perhaps you could explain what sorts of problems I might be letting myself in for if I go through with the plan."
"I don't see why," Alera responded. "You're going to do it in any case."
"Perhaps."
She shook her head. "What you are asking is going to set certain cycles into motion. The ultimate result of those cycles could be the slow freezing of the world. Glaciers that grow and grow each year, slowly devouring all the land before them."
Tavi had just picked up a glass of watered wine and taken a drink. He half choked on it. "Bloody crows," he croaked. "When?"
"Not in your lifetime," Alera said. "Or in the lifetimes of your children, or their children. Perhaps not in the lifetime of your entire people. Almost certainly, beyond the length of time your written memory will survive you. A thousand years, or two thousands, or three or twenty. But it will come."
"If I do not act," Tavi said, "the vord will destroy my people before the snow flies this year." He shook his head. "The Alerans of thousands of years in the future will never have the chance to exist - and you'll never get to tell anyone that you told them so. The theoretical Alerans of tomorrow will have to look out for themselves."